Searching for a Common Place: Thoughts on Crisis, Marginality, and Social Change

Abstract

This essay describes our neoliberal moment of crisis as a displacement of meaning regarding the more established notions of margin-center. Our times paradoxically ‘unite’ in that we are unwittingly governed by a financial logic that privileges personal gain over collective well-being. With this in mind, the essay will discuss strategies for examining oppression and imagining progress that is multidimensional and intersectional and thinks about the contestatory power in political and intellectual discourses that are linked to a multi-layered, feminist-gendered perspective in order to point to avenues that might lead to incisive political transformation.

Keywords

• crisis
• neoliberalism
• marginality
• democracy
• liberal arts
• gender